NRL LESSON TO BUILD ON
FOR cities like the Gold Coast, there are lessons to be learned from the NRL grand final this weekend, even before the referee’s whistle sounds the kick-off.
One major lesson concerns club culture and how dynasties are developed.
The Melbourne Storm has built a machine around the famous “spine’’ of Cameron Smith, Cooper Cronk and Billy Slater, the Queensland connection that has recorded more than 1000 first-grade games together and will run on the park together for the last time in club colours tomorrow before Cronk moves to Sydney and possible retirement, and Slater might similarly ride into the sunset if the Storm win.
The rise of the Storm is a remarkable story of a team playing a game that is foreign to a home city that was and remains an AFL town. It has suffered heavy weather along the way, losing two premiership titles because of salary cap transgressions.
But it keeps coming back and raising the bar higher, always competitive in a tough game, united as a team because its game is so different in Melbourne and players and families bond for that reason.
The Cowboys club has also weathered hard times. North Queensland was the mob of easybeats for too many years before the club was forced to jettison administrators and players and build a new culture that has won a premiership and brought it to the brink of another against huge odds, having lost stars Johnathan Thurston and Matt Scott to injury.
It is a team from a city with a strong parochial attitude of “us against the south’’.
And its grand final line-up is also built in part on a combination of longstanding allegiance, with four of its players this weekend – Michael Morgan, Kyle Feldt, Coen Hess and Corey Jensen – the products of a single Townsville school, Ignatius Park College, which has been a nursery for firstgrade players fostered in an environment of social justice, and looking out for your mates and the downtrodden.
Tomorrow’s grand final will be a showpiece of Queensland talent.
It will also be an example to clubs like the Gold Coast Titans, which is about to embark on its own rebuilding under a yetto-be-named coach, of how strong teams are a construct of bonds, attitudes and loyalties that run deep and are built over time.